Browsing the Net

Nov 13, 2016

Epiphany (Web) is a lightweight Linux-only web browser based on the modern WebKit engine, and it is the default web browser in GNOME desktop environment. However, now you can run it natively in Windows 10, thanks to the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and the Xming X server for Windows.

Mar 23, 2016

Apart from the most popular web browsers for Windows - Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, IE and Edge - there are also more lightweight open source web browsers, which deserve more recognition. This time I am testing the latest versions of four of them: K-Meleon 76.0 beta 3 (based on Gecko), Otter Browser 0.9.10 (based both on QtWebKit and on QtWebEngine), QupZilla 1.8.9 (based on QtWebKit) and Midori 0.5.11 (based on WebKitGTK+), on a PC with Windows 8 and 2 GB RAM. In the comparison test I am focusing on HTML5 features, performance and RAM usage at startup and after loading four big websites in tabs.

Here are the results:

K-Meleon

Otter QtWebKit

Otter QtWebEngine

QupZilla

Midori

HTML5 Test

467 pts

399 pts

525 pts

400 pts

341 pts

Octane Benchmark

5915 pts

1222 pts

6653 pts

1285 pts

806 pts

BrowserMark

1590 pts

1165 pts

1926 pts

1052 pts

149 pts

RAM at startup

35 MB

12 MB

54 MB

40 MB

40 MB

RAM at 4 tabs

151 MB

335 MB

236 MB

395 MB

271 MB

The best alternative web browser is Otter Browser with QtWebEngine (based on Chromium), made by a Polish developer Emdek. This is the only multi-process web browser out of them and has a really good performance. The second place goes to K-Meleon. That said, QtWebEngine is still in the works, so it may be buggy, and it uses more memory than Gecko engine used in K-Meleon.

Mar 3, 2016

Only 27% of the global population has access to a fast internet (over 10 Mbps) and hundreds of millions of people around the world have a limited Internet connection. This is where a data compression proxy (a.k.a. web accelerator) comes to the rescue. It optimizes loading of web pages by minimizing HTML/CSS/JS, enabling gzip compression, re-encoding images, etc.

Jan 18, 2016

While everybody is talking about Remix OS, there is another free Chinese Android distribution for a desktop PC based on Android-x86 called Phoenix OS. It is still in the beta stage, although it should run on most of 64-bit x86-compatible machines. Just write the downloaded ZIP file to a USB drive using USBMaker and boot a PC from it. There is also an ARM version of Phoenix OS and a 32-bit version should be available soon.

Phoenix OS is based on Android Lollipop 5.1.1 and Linux kernel 4.0.9 with support for OpenGL ES 3.0. It runs Android packages (APK) and it has a few of them pre-installed, like Stardust Browser based on Chromium 45 and WPS Office. The rest you can download from Google Play Store, F-Droid, Mobogenie or Aptoide.

May 21, 2015

Slack is a popular communication soft bloatware for teams. It allows you to chat with other users, groups and in channels (rooms), like good old IRC. However, the main issue with Slack is that is it way too bloated and loads too slowly. It takes 105 requests, 18 MB of data and 30 seconds to load!

So if you are concerned about your data plan, performance, or security of your business correspondence stored on third party servers, you should consider one of the lightweight open source web alternatives for Slack:

Feb 19, 2015

Firefox OS is a fully open source mobile platform, but it lacks many full-featured apps. Starting from today, RollApp provides full desktop apps for Firefox OS, including LibreOffice, OpenOffice.org, Tomboy, KeePassX and File Roller. The apps are loaded on RollApp cloud servers and are streamed using WebSockets, which make them run smoothly.

You can even run the Web browser, powered by WebKit, which you can start by typing any URL in Tomboy and clicking on it.

The Web browser is really fast, it gets 6568 points in the Octane benchmark.

UPDATE: Now you can run Chromium web browser in Firefox OS! It scores 9677 points in the Octane benchmark.

Dec 19, 2014

Google Chrome for iOS and Android have been using Data Compression Proxy for a while. This feature has been brought to desktop thanks to the open source Data Compression Proxy extension by niu tech. Now Google is developing its own extension entitled Data Saver (codenamed Flywheel Desktop), screenshot of which has recently leaked: